Malaysia has cut former Prime Minister Najib Razak’s 12-year prison sentence for corruption in half, according to authorities in the Southeast Asian country.

Najib, who served as prime minister from 2009 to 2018, was found guilty of money laundering, abuse of power and other charges in 2020 related to the 1MDB scandal, which saw billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money embezzled out of Malaysia.

In a statement Friday, the country’s Federal Territories Pardon Board said the former leader’s application to shorten his prison sentence to six years had been approved.

Najib’s fine has also been reduced to 50 million ringgit ($10.6 million), but his sentence will be extended by a year if he does not pay it in full before his new scheduled release date of August 23, 2028, the board added.

Najib has consistently denied wrongdoing, but Malaysia’s High Court rejected multiple appeals against his convictions on charges related to the onetime sovereign wealth fund, which prosecutors alleged he and his allies used as a personal piggybank to support luxurious lifestyles and fund electioneering.

The 1MDB fund was created soon after Najib took office in 2009. The government pumped billions in public money into it, with the stated purpose of leading “market-driven initiatives to assist the government in propelling Malaysia towards becoming a developed nation that is highly competitive, sustainable and inclusive.”

Instead, according to United States prosecutors, 1MDB was used as a slush fund by Najib and other high-ranking officials at the fund.

Goldman Sachs, which underwrote much of the 1MDB fund and was facing a host of criminal and regulatory proceedings in Malaysia, agreed to a $3.9 billion settlement with the country’s government in 2020.

Off the Siberian coast, not far from Alaska, a Russian ship has been docked at port for four years. The Akademik Lomonosov, the world’s first floating nuclear power plant, sends energy to around 200,000 people on land using next-wave nuclear technology: small modular reactors.

This technology is also being used below sea level. Dozens of US submarines lurking in the depths of the world’s oceans are propelled by SMRs, as the compact reactors are known.

SMRs — which are smaller and less costly to build than traditional, large-scale reactors — are fast becoming the next great hope for a nuclear renaissance as the world scrambles to cut fossil fuels. And the US, Russia and China are battling for dominance to build and sell them.

The Biden administration and American companies are plowing billions of dollars into SMRs in a bid for business and global influence. China is leading in nuclear technology and construction, and Russia is making almost all the world’s SMR fuel. The US is playing catch-up on both.

There’s no mystery behind why the US wants in on the market. It already lost the wind and solar energy race to China, which now provides most of the world’s solar panels and wind turbines. The big problem: The US hasn’t managed to get an SMR working commercially on land.

SMRs are potentially an enormous global market that could bring money and jobs to the US, which is trying to sell entire fleets of reactors to countries, rather than the bespoke, large-scale power plants that notoriously go over budget and way past deadline.

While SMRs provide less energy — typically a third of a traditional plant — they require less space and can be built in more places. They are made up of small parts that can be easily delivered and assembled on site, like a nuclear plant flatpack.

Most countries are trying to rapidly decarbonize their energy systems to address the climate crisis. Wind and solar now provide at least 12% of the world’s power, and in some places, like the European Union, they provide more than fossil fuels. But there’s an increasing sense of urgency to clean up our energy systems as extreme weather events wreak havoc on the planet and as challenges with renewables remain.

For some experts, nuclear energy — in all forms, large or small — has an important role to play in that transition. The International Energy Agency, which outlined what many experts say is the world’s most realistic plan to decarbonize, sees a need to more than double nuclear energy by 2050.

“There’s definitely a huge race on,” said Josh Freed, who leads the Climate and Energy Program at the think tank Third Way. “China and Russia have more agreements to build all sorts of reactors overseas than the US does. That’s what the US needs to catch up on.”

US targets Russia’s and China’s neighbors

The US is trying to sell SMR technology to countries that have never used nuclear power in their histories. To convince them that SMRs are a good option, they’ll need to pitch hard on safety.

Globally, the construction of conventional nuclear power plants dipped following the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, and fell again after Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011, data from the World Nuclear Industry Status Report shows. They started to tick up soon after, but new projects were heavily concentrated in China.

Most of the world has been cold on nuclear for the past decade or so.

But a nuclear renaissance is coming, the IEA says. The organization predicts nuclear power generation globally will reach an all-time high in 2025. That’s because several traditional nuclear plants in Japan that were put on pause after Fukushima will soon be restarted, and new reactors in China, India, South Korea and Europe will start operating.

It seems that decades-old fears over the safety of nuclear are starting to fade, and people — or their governments at least — are weighing the benefits against the risks, including the problem of storing radioactive waste, which can remain dangerous for thousands of years. That could create a more hospitable market for countries looking to export SMRs.

If SMRs help boost the popularity of nuclear energy, they could become a powerful way to address climate change. Nuclear power, generally, doesn’t emit planet-warming carbon pollution when used and generates more energy per square meter of land use than any fossil fuel or renewable, according to an analysis by Our World in Data.

At the COP28 climate talks in Dubai in December, the US led a pledge to triple the world’s nuclear energy capacity, which 25 nations have now signed onto. And the US government has earmarked $72 million to its international SMR program, known as FIRST, to provide countries with a whole suite of tools — from workshops to engineering and feasibility studies — to provide them with everything they need to buy an SMR fleet made in America.

But bigger money is coming in the form of loans from state financial institutions, like the US Export-Import Bank and its International Development Finance Corporation, which have offered up $3 billion and $1 billion, respectively. Those have gone to two SMRs in Poland designed by GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, a US-Japanese partnership headquartered in North Carolina.

The US and American companies are also finding success in Southeast Asia — a region where many countries are seeking to loosen their ties with China — as well as central and eastern Europe, where some nations that depend on Russian gas are trying to cut their reliance on Vladimir Putin’s increasingly hostile nation.

These efforts could threaten Russia’s ambitions abroad. Russia has already built or designed nuclear plants — the traditional type — for China, India, Bangladesh, Turkey, Slovakia, Egypt and Iran. Russia is also courting countries with the Akademik Lomonosov in Siberia: The CEO of Russia’s state-owned nuclear company said last year that dozens of countries had expressed interest in Russian-made floating SMRs.

Russia has another edge: its state nuclear company supplies almost all the world’s demand for SMR fuel — enriched uranium known as HALEU.

But the US and UK, among others, are investing in their own fuel production at home. That’s essential — two SMR demonstration projects, one by X-energy in Texas and another by Bill Gates’ TerraPower in Wyoming, were awarded government support to get up and running by 2028. They will need fuel to do so.

China isn’t building many nuclear plants abroad but as the only country to have an SMR in operation on land, it’s in a good position to win a large share of the market.

It’s very difficult for American nuclear energy companies to compete with those from countries like Russia and China, which have state-run utilities that don’t have to prove their power is economical.

“Our nuclear vendors are competing against cheap, natural gas in the US,” said Kirsten Cutler, a Senior Strategist for Nuclear Energy Innovation at the US State Department. “Abroad, they’re competing against authoritarian-backed entities who are throwing in a lot of political pressure and package deals.”

But Cutler points out that nuclear deals create decades-long relationships with other countries that require trust and benefit from stability.

“Who are you going to have that relationship with? Countries recognize the risks of working with authoritarian-backed suppliers and seek partners that will strengthen their independence and their energy security,” Cutler said. “These are not trivial decisions. They’re really important 50 to 100-year decisions, and they seek the United States.”

Flexing diplomatic muscle

If the US intends to prove it can deliver an SMR, it’s not unreasonable to expect the technology to be economically viable — something the country is struggling to show.

In 2020, Oregon-based NuScale’s SMR design was the first in the country to win regulatory approval. But it announced in November 2023 it was pulling the plug on an Idaho-based demonstration project that could have ushered in the next wave of SMRs. Its costs had nearly doubled, which meant the project wouldn’t have been able to generate power at a price people would pay.

Much like large-scale nuclear plants, NuScale’s primary issue was high costs, as already expensive building supplies converged with tight supply chains, inflation and high interest rates.

It was a major blow to the argument that SMRs would be cheaper and faster to build than traditional reactors.

“It certainly dampens the excitement abroad,” said John Parsons, a senior lecturer at MIT and a financial economist focused on nuclear energy. “It makes a big difference in the marketing if the US is out there making it happen. Then people who are interested in nuclear have an easier case in their country.”

In a November statement, NuScale expressed confidence it could keep and find other customers for its power domestically and abroad.

The US is trying to flex its muscle in diplomatic circles to win this race, too.

US climate envoy John Kerry was among the most vocal supporters of nuclear energy at the COP28 climate summit. And according to an analysis by climate consultancy InfluenceMap, the US was the only foreign country to lobby the European Union to include nuclear power in its official list of energy sources the bloc considers “green,” and therefore eligible for central funding. The State Department said it does not comment on diplomatic activities when asked to confirm its lobbying.

While the US nuclear industry struggles with budgets and timelines, its rigorous approach to projects may have some payoff.

European allies, for example, trust the US’ Nuclear Regulatory Commission, particularly on safety standards, the Third Way’s Freed said. If an SMR is licensed by the NRC and built in the US, then it “gets the gold seal” of approval from other countries, he added.

But if the US wants to really make nuclear energy from SMRs more economically viable, it will have to take a look at its fossil fuel production.

“The target here is to produce electricity cheaper than coal and gas plants,” Parsons said. These fossil fuel plants are “terribly simple and cheap to run — they’re just dirty,” he added.

Even if there can be a dramatic takeoff in the US’ SMR industry, it will still take years to scale up. It will probably take until the end of this decade to even glean whether it’s viable, said Mohammed Hamdaoui, vice president of renewables and power at research firm Rystad Energy.

And that’s a problem — the scientific consensus is that the world needs to make deep sustained cuts to carbon pollution this decade to ward off catastrophic climate change.

“I don’t see it being a big player in the energy mix until the second part of the next decade,” Hamdaoui said. “It’s going to take time.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified where X-energy intends to demonstrate its SMR. It is Texas. This story has been updated.

Microscopic fragments of protein and DNA recovered from bones discovered in 8-meter-deep cave dirt have revealed Neanderthals and humans likely lived alongside one another in northern Europe as far back as 45,000 years ago.

The genetic analysis of the fossils, which were found in a cave near the town of Ranis in eastern Germany, suggested that modern humans were the makers of distinctive, leaf-shaped stone tools that archaeologists once believed were crafted by Neanderthals, the heavily built hominins who lived in Europe until about 40,000 years ago.

Modern humans, or homo sapiens, weren’t previously known to have lived as far north as the region where the tools were made.

“The Ranis cave site provides evidence for the first dispersal of Homo sapiens across the higher latitudes of Europe. It turns out that stone artifacts that were thought to be produced by Neanderthals were, in fact, part of the early Homo sapiens toolkit,” said research author Jean-Jacques Hublin, a professor at the Collège de France in Paris and emeritus director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in a news release.

“This fundamentally changes our previous knowledge about the period: Homo sapiens reached northwestern Europe long before Neanderthal disappearance in southwestern Europe.”

The discovery means the two groups, who once interbred and left most humans alive today with traces of Neanderthal DNA, may have overlapped for several thousand years. It also shows that Homo sapiens, our species, crossed the Alps into the cold climes of northern and central Europe earlier than thought.

Three studies detailing the discoveries and lab analysis were published Wednesday in the journals Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Earliest Homo sapiens fossils found north of the Alps

The style of stone tool found at Ranis has also been discovered elsewhere across Europe, from Moravia and eastern Poland to the British Isles, according to the studies. Archaeologists call the tool style Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician, or LRJ, in reference to the places where it was first identified.

To identify who made the artifacts, the team excavated Ilsenhöhle cave near Ranis from 2016 to 2022. When the cave was first excavated in the 1930s, only the tools were found and analyzed. This time around the team was able to dig deeper and more systematically, ultimately uncovering human fossils there for the first time.

“The challenge was to excavate the full 8-metre sequence from top to bottom, hoping that some deposits were left from the 1930s excavation,” said study coauthor Marcel Weiss, a researcher at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in a statement. “We were fortunate to find a 1.7 metre thick rock the previous excavators did not get past. After removing that rock by hand, we finally uncovered the LRJ layers and even found human fossils.”

However, the human remains weren’t immediately identifiable among the hundreds of bone fragments unearthed during the six-year dig. It was only later the team knew definitively that the layers of sediment that contained the LRJ stone tools also included humans remains.

The researchers used proteins extracted from bone fragments to identify animal and human remains they found, a technique known as palaeoproteomics. It allows scientists to identify human and animal bones when their form is unclear or uncertain. Using the same technique, the team also managed to identify human remains among bones excavated during the 1930s.

However, the protein analysis was only able to identify the bones as belonging to hominins — a category that includes Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthals. To distinguish between the two, the team was able to extract fragments of ancient DNA from the 13 human fossils they identified.

“We confirmed that the skeletal fragments belonged to Homo sapiens,” said study coauthor Elena Zavala, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in the release.

“Interestingly, several fragments shared the same mitochondrial DNA sequences — even fragments from different excavations,” Zavala added. “This indicates that the fragments belonged to the same individual or were maternal relatives, linking these new finds with the ones from decades ago.”

Unexpected adaptability

Radiocarbon dating of the fossils and other artifacts in the cave suggested that these early humans were living there from around 45,000 years ago, making them the earliest Homo sapiens known to have inhabited northwestern Europe.

The region would have had a dramatically different climate then, with conditions typical of steppe tundra such as that found in present-day Siberia. The dig revealed the presence of reindeer, cave bears, woolly rhinoceroses and horses. The researchers also concluded that hibernating cave bears and denning hyenas primarily used the cave, which had only periodic human presence.

“This shows that even these earlier groups of Homo sapiens dispersing across Eurasia already had some capacity to adapt to such harsh climatic conditions,” said coauthor Sarah Pederzani, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of La Laguna in Spain, who led the paleoclimate study of the site. “Until recently, it was thought that resilience to cold-climate conditions did not appear until several thousand years later, so this is a fascinating and surprising result,” she said, according to the news release.

William E. Banks, a researcher at the University of Bordeaux in France, said the studies showed how new methods are allowing archaeologists to examine sites in unprecedented detail, improving the ability to pinpoint when a site was occupied.

The “discoveries provide another important piece of the puzzle of this culturally and demographically complex period in Europe,” Banks noted in a commentary published alongside the studies. However, Banks, who wasn’t involved in the research, added that archaeologists “must be careful not to generalize findings from one or two sites.”

He noted that recent discoveries suggested Neanderthals were more culturally and cognitively complex than popular stereotypes suggest and that archaeologists should “not necessarily assume” in all cases that modern humans made more complex styles of stone tools from that pivotal period before Neanderthals disappeared.

It had been three months since Maggie Mbitu was found dead at Boston’s airport, and authorities seemed no closer to finding the man suspected of killing her and fleeing the country.

Within hours authorities identified the man as fugitive Kevin Kangethe, a Boston-area man who US investigators said boarded a plane to Kenya shortly after killing his girlfriend. Authorities in Massachusetts had obtained a warrant for Kangethe’s arrest on a murder charge.

Mbitu’s body was found in Kangethe’s SUV in a parking garage at Boston Logan International Airport on November 1, two days after she was reported missing. The 31-year-old had slash wounds on her face and neck, Massachusetts State Police said in an affidavit.

The arrest in Nairobi happened after someone alerted police that a man at the club resembled images of the suspect they’d seen on social media, said Adamson Bungei, the Nairobi regional police commander.

Through the conversation, officers “made the connections positively identifying him,” Bungei said.

Kangethe did not resist arrest and had his passport with him, which helped confirm his identification, said Francis Sang, a subcounty police commander. Sang declined to say whether it was a Kenyan or American passport or share what officers and Kangethe talked about before his arrest.

Kevin Hayden, District Attorney of Suffolk County in suburban Boston, thanked the US State Department, the FBI, the state police, the Kenyan government and Kenyan law enforcement agencies for facilitating the arrest.

“Their tremendous and untiring efforts will provide Margaret’s family and friends the opportunity to see Kevin Kangethe face justice for this terrible crime,” Hayden said in a statement.

Authorities are seeking to have Kangethe extradited to the US

Kangethe arrived in Kenya last fall through Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the nation’s director of public prosecutions said in a statement. He went into hiding in the city’s suburbs but stayed in touch via phone with his friends and relatives, including those in the United States, the statement said.

The 41-year-old appeared in court Thursday for a hearing on his extradition.

Kenya has an extradition treaty with the United States. The nation’s director of public prosecutions said Kenya has received a formal extradition request from the US and determined there’s “sufficient evidence” against him.

It was Kangethe’s second court appearance since his arrest. His first hearing was Wednesday, a day after his arrest. He wore eyeglasses and occasionally looked down as the prosecutor asked the court to detain him for 30 days so US officials can work out the extradition process.

“Have you understood the application by the prosecutor?” the judge asked. Kangethe nodded. “Do you have any objections?” The judge asked. Kangethe shook his head.

A US Diplomatic Security Service official declined to comment on how the extradition process works.

Police have not revealed a motive in the killing

Mbitu lived in Whitman, a Boston suburb, and was the youngest in a family of health care workers. Her two older sisters and her mother are all nurses.

She was reported missing in late October after she didn’t show up for work, which was uncommon for her.

Her family notified the police and called nearby hospitals to check if she was a patient. The next evening, police made a gruesome discovery: her bloodied body, in the SUV inside a parking garage at the airport.

In a criminal complaint from the Massachusetts State Police, authorities say they “were led to Mbitu’s boyfriend” after she went missing.

The day before her body was found, Kangethe boarded flights from Boston to Kenya. Surveillance footage showed him leaving the parking garage and entering an airport terminal, police said.

Investigators learned he had bought a plane ticket the previous morning, state police said.

Kangethe lived in Lowell, a suburb northwest of Boston. License plate recognition cameras had picked up the whereabouts of his Toyota SUV and it appeared consistent with the location of Mbitu’s phone, according to the criminal complaint.

Authorities tracked the vehicle from Lowell to the Logan Airport parking garage, where they found her dead in the car.  Police have not divulged a possible motive, leaving her family and friends to grapple with unanswered questions — and their grief.

Law enforcement officials in Kenya tracked Kangethe’s whereabouts there while US state and federal authorities coordinated his arrest, the Massachusetts State Police said.

Ukraine’s embattled army chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, says Ukraine must adapt to a reduction in military aid from its key allies and focus ever more strongly on technology if it is to win its war against Russia.

The general’s article makes no reference to his relationship with the president, nor to reports Zelensky is poised to announce his dismissal after four years in the job, a move a source said could come within days.

Instead, the military commander seeks to build on an argument in an essay published three months ago, in addition to commenting for the first time on a series of political setbacks at home and abroad.

In that first essay, published in the Economist, Zaluzhnyi highlighted the importance of unmanned aerial vehicles and electronic warfare capabilities, as a priority for Ukraine, before concluding, “New innovative approaches can turn this war of position into one of maneuver.”

Zaluzhnyi’s characterization of the situation as a war of position – one defined by attrition and a lack of movement on the battlefield – amounted to a recognition that the Ukrainian counteroffensive, launched to great fanfare earlier in 2023, was effectively over.

Expectations earlier in the year were high that Ukraine could go on the attack and drive forward, conducting a war of maneuver to recapture significant amounts of territory lost to Russia in 2022.

But deep Russian minefields and heavy Russian artillery fire, along with the rapid proliferation of First-Person-View (FPV) drones across the frontlines, making stealth attacks much harder, proved difficult to overcome.

In the south, the primary focus of the effort, Ukrainian forces advanced about 20 kilometers; the hope had been they might be able to make it all the way to the coast, about 70 kilometers away.

When Zaluzhny – in a separate interview at the same time – referred to the situation as a ‘stalemate,’ Zelensky’s office snapped, saying such talk only helped Russia.

Now, though, he clearly believes Ukraine’s military leaders must take account of a series of disappointments and distractions away from the battlefield as well.

Indirectly, he references the failure of the United States to agree a new military aid package for Ukraine, as well as the fact that developments in the Middle East since October have drawn international attention elsewhere.

In addition, “the weakness of the international sanctions’ regime means Russia … is still able to deploy its military-industrial complex in pursuit of a war of attrition against us.”

He does not say it in as many words, but the article seems to suggest a growing sense that, ultimately, Ukraine’s fate is in its own hands.

An attitude of self-help is not new in Ukraine, of course.

It has prioritized its home-grown drone industry, for instance, notching up successes both in its sea drone program, striking Russian naval targets in the Black Sea, and with its long-range aerial drones, flying hundreds of kilometers to hit sites in and around Russia’s largest cities.

But domestic problems are clearly a concern, as when Zaluzhnyi references the apparent reluctance of his political masters in Kyiv to get fully behind his call for greater mobilization for up to half a million draftees, an acknowledgment of Russia’s overwhelmingly superior troop numbers.

“We must acknowledge the significant advantage enjoyed by [Russia] in mobilizing human resources and how that compares with the inability of state institutions in Ukraine to improve the manpower levels of our armed forces without the use of unpopular measures,” he writes.

In a society possibly reluctant to put large numbers of young men and women directly in harm’s way, remote-controlled drones provide a more acceptable type of combat operation, as he acknowledges.

Technology, he writes at one point, “boasts an undoubted superiority over tradition.”

But its importance goes much further, he says, as he sets out his belief that unmanned aerial vehicles, along with other high-tech capabilities have revolutionized not just combat operations but the overall approach to strategy, too.

Only an end to “outdated, stereotypical thinking” can help modern armies achieve victory in war, he writes.

Read Valerii Zaluzhnyi’s full essay here.

Ukraine’s military intelligence says it sank a Russian warship off the coast of Crimea overnight into Thursday, landing the latest in a series of blows to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet after mounting a “massive” missile attack on the occupied peninsula hours earlier.

Russia’s guided missile ship, the “Ivanovets,” suffered multiple hits to its hull before it sank overnight in the harbor of Lake Donuzlav, Crimea’s deepest lake, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence said.

Russia’s Defense Ministry, the Kremlin and other Russian officials have not yet commented on the incident.

The sinking of the Ivanovets is the latest in a series of Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, as it attempts to land both strategic and symbolic blows against Russian forces that annexed Crimea in 2014.

Ukraine has previously said its strikes on Crimea and on Russian ships are intended to try to isolate the peninsula and make it more difficult for Russia to sustain its military operations on the Ukrainian mainland, where the front lines have remained mostly static for months.

The most notable of its strikes was the attack on the Moskva in April 2022, which forced Russia to change the way it operates close to areas controlled by Ukraine. The vessel became infamous after it threatened to bomb Snake Island in the Black Sea if the Ukrainian soldiers defending it did not surrender. “Russian warship, go f*** yourself,” one of the soldiers responded.

The strike on the Ivanovets came hours after Ukraine on Wednesday launched a barrage of missiles at Crimea, in what Ukraine’s Air Force Commander described as part of “the cleansing of Crimea from the Russian presence.”

Ukraine launched 20 airborne guided missiles at Crimea, with Russian air defenses destroying 17 of them over the Black Sea and three more over the peninsula, according to Russia’s Defense Ministry. It said some of the missiles were intercepted close to the Belbek airfield near the city of Sevastopol.

“Our military repelled a massive attack on Sevastopol,” the Russia-appointed governor of the city Mikhail Razvozhaev said Wednesday, adding more than six missiles were shot down.

Razvozhaev said about a dozen buildings were hit by falling debris, which resulted in broken windows and other damage, but no injuries were reported.

The Belbek airfield was formerly the base of Ukraine’s 204th Tactical Aviation Brigade, Mykola Oleshchuk, Commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, said Wednesday in a Telegram post, accompanied by video of an explosion.

“Ukrainian aviators will definitely return home to their home airfield. In the meantime, I thank everyone who contributed to the cleansing of Crimea from the Russian presence,” Oleshchuk said.

Yurii Ihnat, spokesman for the Air Force Command, on Thursday echoed those comments, saying “certain facilities on the peninsula were hit.”

The attacks come as speculation swirls about the possible firing of the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, following weeks of growing speculation over tensions with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

A South African entrepreneur who designed a smart locker system that improves access to healthcare has won a major award for African engineering.

Neo Hutiri is the creator of Pelebox, a system of internet-enabled lockers that dispense medication for chronic conditions to patients, helping to cut down queues and ease pressure on hospital resources. He was awarded £50,000 ($63,000) by the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering, as well as a medal, which was presented by King Charles III’s sister Princess Anne during a ceremony in London on Wednesday evening.

The event marked the 10-year anniversary of the Academy’s prestigious Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, which recognizes entrepreneurs that have developed technology to address local challenges on the continent, from improving access to power, to adapting to climate change.

For the anniversary, the Academy put on a special edition of the annual competition, dedicated to its alumni. It shortlisted 12 innovations from across six countries that have participated in its training program over the last decade, and after a pitching session during yesterday’s event, a panel of six judges chose a winner. In June, the usual iteration of the Africa Prize will also go ahead, during which four finalists will battle it out for a £25,000 ($31,600) prize.

Hutiri first won the Africa Prize for his lockers in 2019, when he was running a pilot program for the Pelebox concept. Since then, the startup has expanded significantly, and the innovation is now used in 123 healthcare facilities across South Africa, Namibia and Botswana.

“We want to see Pelebox operating across six countries and this award will position us to build the right team, enhance our product and enable us to continue reaching and creating value for patients that are spending hours and hours in clinics in southern Africa,” he says.

“Incredible solutions”

Just missing out on the anniversary medal were two runners-up who received £15,000 ($19,000) each: Nigerian entrepreneur Aisha Raheem with Farmz2U, a digital platform that prevents food waste by helping farms plan their crops, and Samuel Njuguna, from Kenya, with Chura Limited, which aims to tackle poor mobile signal with a web-based, multi-network system that allows users to move between SIM cards regardless of carrier.

In total the Academy will invest more than £1 million ($1.2 million) this year in alumni of the Africa Prize through grants, prizes and accelerator programs.

The goal, according to Cameroonian technology entrepreneur and prize judge Rebecca Enonchong, is to help scale up engineering innovations and maximize their impact. It’s also an opportunity to showcase African talent to the rest of the world.

Since its founding in 2014, the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation has supported more than 140 entrepreneurs from across 23 African countries with business training programs, as well as engineering mentoring, communications support and pitching opportunities. The Academy says that alumni from the prize have collectively raised more than $39 million in finance and have introduced more than 470 products and services to the global market.

For Enonchong, it’s vital that the prize represents entrepreneurs from all over the continent. “If you look at the landscape of innovation on the African continent, you’ll see South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria (and) Egypt, getting the most amount of funding and generally the most amount of attention for the founders. That’s not necessarily where all the innovation comes from. It just means that they have stronger, bigger, more developed ecosystems,” she says.

“It’s critical for us to be able to showcase talent from across the continent, because even in small towns and villages on the continent, you have innovators and people that are developing incredible solutions,” she adds.

The European Union agreed a funding deal worth more than $50 billion for Ukraine in a crucial summit on Thursday that comes at a pivotal moment in the war.

The funds had been blocked since December after Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban had vetoed the deal at a previous summit. Failure to have reached an agreement would have been a major blow to Ukraine, at a time when its outmanned and outgunned forces are struggling on the battlefield amid a renewed Russian assault. Meanwhile, military aid from the United States has dried up amid an ongoing battle in Washington over future funding for Kyiv.

“We have a deal. #Unity All 27 leaders agreed on an additional €50 billion support package for Ukraine within the EU budget,” the EU Council’s President Charles Michel wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “This locks in steadfast, long-term, predictable funding for #Ukraine.

“EU is taking leadership & responsibility in support for Ukraine; we know what is at stake.”

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky gave his backing to the decision after it was announced. “Grateful to @CharlesMichel and EU leaders for establishing the €50 billion Ukraine Facility for 2024-2027,” he tweeted.

“It is very important that the decision was made by all 27 leaders, which once again proves strong EU unity.

“Continued EU financial support for Ukraine will strengthen long-term economic and financial stability, which is no less important than military assistance and sanctions pressure on Russia.”

Orban had held up the deal on the grounds he did not want the funds to come from the EU budget, meaning funds would be taken from EU member states and sent to Ukraine. He also said Hungary could only agree to sending the money if there was an annual review.

Critics of Orban were quick to accuse him of blocking the deal because the EU is currently withholding funds for Ukraine due to it breaching rule of law requirements. Orban and members of his government have repeatedly denied that there is any connection between the two, or that they have breached EU rules.

The diplomat said the deal as outlined by Michel does not unlock EU funds for Hungary, though the summit will continue throughout Thursday.

European officials had feared that Orban would continue blocking the deal not only because of money to Hungary being frozen by Brussels, but also because of his unusually close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Orban’s critics across Europe believe that he was leveraging that relationship in order to bully his European allies by playing the part of a Kremlin stooge: Act tough on support for Ukraine, a key priority for most of Europe, in exchange for concessions in other areas.

This is a developing story. More details to come.

Protesting farmers descended on the heart of the European Union on Thursday as leaders across the bloc held a crucial meeting at which they agreed new funding for Ukraine.

Demonstrators rolled into Brussels in their tractors in the early morning hours before gathering outside the European Parliament where the summit was being held, blaring horns, hurling eggs and sparking fires.

A handful of tractors had been parked near the EU Parliament all week before convoys from across the country converged on Thursday morning.

Some of the protesters set objects on fire in front of the parliament building, while others held signs with slogans including: “No farmers, no food.”

Police said on Thursday that around 1,000 tractors were expected in the Belgian capital for the planned demonstration, warning about “traffic problems” in the area.

Although EU farming issues are not part of the summit’s agenda, the demonstrators are aiming to put pressure on the bloc for their grievances to be heard.

Farmers have called for a loosening of the rules that govern the bloc’s shared agricultural policy, saying they are not paid enough, are being choked by taxes and environmental restrictions and face unfair competition from abroad – including cheap agricultural imports from Ukraine.

The EU has waived quotas and duties on Ukrainian imports in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo called their concerns “perfectly legitimate.”

“As you have seen, there is a major farmers protest in Brussels. We need to be able to discuss in the Council on this topic because the concerns that they have are perfectly legitimate.

“The climate transition is a key priority for our societies. We need to make sure that our farmers can be a partner in this,” De Croo said on arrival at the summit.

Protests have also taken place over the past days in Italy, Spain, Romania, Poland, Germany, Portugal and the Netherlands.

In Greece, tractors are marching towards the second biggest city of Thessaloniki Thursday, hoping to block key routes inside the city.

In France, protesting farmers continue their roadblocks outside of Paris and near the cities of Lyon and Toulouse.

In an effort to address some of the farming industry’s concerns, the European Commission proposed a “temporary” exemption for farmers to an EU rule that would oblige them to keep 4% of their arable land fallow or unproductive for biodiversity purposes.

It also proposed to “renew the suspension of import duties and quotas on Ukrainian exports to the EU for another year, while reinforcing protection for sensitive EU agricultural products.”

China has executed a couple for throwing two toddlers out of a high-rise apartment window, in a case that provoked nationwide outrage.

The man and his girlfriend were found guilty of killing the children from his first marriage by staging an accidental fall from a residential tower in the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing, so that they could start a new family.

The father, Zhang Bo, began an affair with Ye Chengchen and initially hid the fact that he was married with children, but Ye found out and Zhang divorced his wife, according to China’s supreme court.

Ye saw Zhang’s two children as an “obstacle” to them getting married and a “burden on their future life together,” the court heard. She repeatedly urged Zhang to kill the toddlers and threatened to break up with him if he didn’t.

After conspiring with Ye, in November 2020, Zhang threw his two-year-old daughter and one-year-old son from his 15th floor apartment when they were playing next to the bedroom window, killing them both, according to the court.

Zhang and Ye were sentenced to death in December 2021.

The Supreme People’s Court said the couple’s crime “seriously challenged the legal and moral bottom line,” calling their criminal motive “extremely despicable” and means “particularly cruel,” state news agency Xinhua reported.

News of their execution drew hundreds of millions of views on Chinese social media site Weibo, where it became a top trending topic.

“They deserved the punishment,” said a top comment with 27,000 likes.

“How very satisfying!” said another with 31,000 likes.

A study published in 2020 shows 68% of Chinese citizens are in favor of death penalty.

His study shows that Chinese people who express political views online tend to show greater support for the death penalty.

“We do not have a clear understanding of the general public’s views on the death penalty in China, and we lack a rigorous data collection channel,” he said.

The 2020 paper was based on the last available nationwide data collected in 2013.

“We don’t know whether public views have shifted since then,” he said.

China does not provide transparent information on the total number of executions, but the country is believed to be “the world’s top executioner” with thousands of people executed and sentenced to death each year, according to human rights group Amnesty International.

Wednesday’s execution also brought into focus the main method used in China to carry out the death penalty: lethal injection.

“It’s basically euthanasia. They had it easy,” said a comment on Weibo with 20,000 likes.

Some drew attention to the recent execution of Alabama inmate Kenneth Smith by nitrogen gas, a new method that experts have said could lead to excessive pain or even torture.

The execution was hailed by some Chinese social media users as a punishment that fits more serious crimes.

“Why do I think the 22-minute execution is very suitable for those who maliciously kill their wives, parents, children and the serial murderers?” a top comment said.